


Rex Nemorensis

by dirtybinary



Category: Howl Series - Diana Wynne Jones, Howl's Moving Castle - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, howl and ben at college, partial Epistolary, soft punk nemeses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-31
Updated: 2017-08-31
Packaged: 2018-12-22 01:14:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11956611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtybinary/pseuds/dirtybinary
Summary: Someone is blasting holes into the fabric of the universe. Wizard Suliman investigates.Or: how Howl found the passageway between Wales and Ingary, with some help.





	Rex Nemorensis

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sonatine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sonatine/gifts).



> look, I just really wanted to write college-era trashcan wizards and their fail attempt at being arch-enemies

The university library’s copy of _The Golden Bough_ came back to Ben five days overdue, fragrant with the echo of strong magic and the lingering scent of jasmine.

Must be Thursday, then.

 

 

The book was none the worse for its long absence. The note Ben had stuck to the inside of the front cover was still there, with its impassioned plea: PLEASE RETURN PROMPTLY THIS TIME I HAVE A TERM PAPER TO WRITE. Plainly it had gone unheeded. As he leafed through the familiar pages, looking for new annotations—a pencilled underline here, an unintelligible squiggle there—a crumpled sheet of glossy paper fluttered out into his lap. This page proclaimed, in the most appalling handwriting he had ever seen: 

> _O Mysterious Foe, Rival for the One Single Copy of this Blessed Book—_
> 
> _I seek your kind notwithstanding [understanding?] in the matter of my Tardiness. I am, in fact, making a conniving [concerted?] Effort, and indeed you will have noxioused [noticed?] that this time I am only five days late; but alas, some last-minute disturbances arose in an Experiment I was running, and I requited [required?] to refer to the Book a little longer. I hope you will find it in your far-reaching magnesiumity [magnanimity?] to pardon me._
> 
> _Pulchritudinously Yours,  
>  __Your Nemesis._  

Ben turned the note over. It was written on the reverse of a flyer for a rugby away game against Cardiff, which seemed to have taken place two years ago. His nemesis was a hoarder. Or perhaps rugby did not obey the same laws of temporality that governed everything else. Ben did not, after all, presume to know anything about sports.

He sniffed the jasmine-scented pages of the book; pressed it to his ear to listen for the hum of magic; and tried, not for the first time, to wrap his head around what manner of person this Nemesis was.

 

 

The Battle for the Book—as Ben called it, only to himself, and only when he was sufficiently underslept to lapse into blood-and-thunder bathos—had been raging ever since he’d found the door to Ingary.

It was a long, interminable struggle against a faceless enemy he’d come to know like he knew himself, the way Holmes knew Moriarty, or Scipio knew Hannibal. It went like this. Ben checked _The Golden Bough_ out of the library for one assignment or another—usually for Mrs. Pentstemmon, but also for his seminars at Swansea—and returned it well before the due date, because he wasn’t a savage. Inevitably, he realised he needed it again, and went back to the library only to discover that someone else had borrowed it in the span of the five hours since he’d dropped it off. Then followed weeks of wild thwarted rage, and calling at the library every day, until at last his book thief of a nemesis deigned to return the book—always overdue, crackling with vestigial magic, and sweet with the perfume of its last reader’s hands.

“You could get your own copy, you know,” Ben’s TA told him reproachfully, as he turned in his term paper on the transmigration of souls the corresponding five days late. (A week later, he would get it back with a big red _A-_ in the corner, and an even bigger and redder _-5 points for late submission!!!_ next to that.) “Or borrow someone else’s. Hell, borrow mine.”

“Sure,” said Ben, as he always did. “Sure, I’ll do that next time.”

He wouldn’t, though. Perhaps it was because he was a broke graduate student who didn’t have twenty quid to spare on a book he could get for free. Perhaps it was that he’d grown attached to the library copy, an ancient cloth-bound hardback with a bright red cover and broad margins crowded with scribblings, the leavings of generation after generation of harried students going all the way back to the 1800s. Or perhaps it was that every time he snatched the book back from the clutches of his nemesis felt like a triumph, and he was so deep into this game of tug-of-war that letting go would mean falling flat on his rear.

He had to admit, in all honesty, that he had a bit of a melodramatic streak. All his notes smelled of jasmine, now.

 

 

“It seems,” Ben told Prince Justin on his next trip into Ingary, “that I’m not the only wizard on campus.” 

Justin pursed his lips in thought, clicking his nails on the fine mahogany of the desk between them. They were in one of the high-vaulted, marble-tiled antechambers of the palace library, waiting for the King to make an appearance. Ben had a presentation to give on the harnessing of wind energy for electricity, and the Prince had a dozen pointed petitions to make about it. “Who’s the other?”

Ben explained about the book thief. It took a while, because he had to digress into a brief overview of how universities and their libraries functioned in modern Wales, and from there into a salt-laden spiel about how he’d had to submit a term paper late because a complete stranger was incapable of returning his library books on time. “Hm,” said Justin, when he was done. “Well, that clears up a great deal.”

Ben hadn’t expected the Prince to take an interest in any of this, but the people of Ingary had surprised him often enough before, and would again. “What?” 

“Those strange reports coming in from the countryside,” said Justin. “People seeing things that aren’t there. One moment they’re working in the fields or crossing their front yards, the next moment they turn their heads just so and get a glimpse into another world. There’s a farmer in Upper Folding saying she witnessed a human sacrifice—a lot of young people in odd clothes running around a field killing each other over a ball, or something—and this fisherman said he saw a rainy street full of tall buildings, and those horseless carriages you were telling us about—”

“Cars,” said Ben absently. 

“Yes, that,” said Justin. “Does sound like something out of your world, doesn’t it?”

Ben shifted uneasily in his seat. He had always known there were plenty of other magical types in his world, some easier to miss than others. But it had not occurred to him before that he might not be the only one who knew about Ingary. “Just glimpses, you say? They can’t get through?” 

“Windows, not doors,” said Justin. “But that’s bad enough. Old Mrs. Pentstemmon’s furious. Says it’s deliberate vandalism. Something about young’uns these days having no regard for inter-universal boundaries, and blasting their way into other people’s patches of space-time, and all that. You know her.”

Ben winced. He was glad he didn’t have another lesson with her till next week. “I put the strongest wards I could think of on that door,” he said. “And you’ve got soldiers guarding it. I don’t think anyone could force their way through.” 

“They’d better not,” said Justin. “Or my brother’ll get scared, and you know how he is when he’s scared. Just—keep an eye on your book thief fellow for me, will you?”

Ben shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “I was going to do that, anyway.”

 

 

> _Nemesis_ , Ben wrote,
> 
> _What sort of experiment were you running? Dare I even ask?_
> 
> _Also, I do still need this book back quite soon._
> 
> _Your Foe_

While waiting, Ben spent his spare minutes between seminars biking across campus, looking for weak spots in the fabric between worlds. Sure enough, he found a few places where the boundary felt soft, somehow, like cardboard left out in the rain: on the bleachers overlooking the rugby pitch, where he thought he caught a glimpse of a field green with new corn; and the driveway just inside the main campus gate, where for a moment it seemed to him that there were tiny fishing vessels afloat on the asphalt, the faces of the people on board turned to him in astonishment.

There was a surge of butterfly wings in the caverns of his chest. It was only fear, Ben thought—fear for the sanctity of the new world he had discovered. It was most certainly not excitement.

He mended the holes as best he could, and went to the library to see if his holds had come in.

 

 

 _The Golden Bough_ came back to him only two days overdue—a first—and palpably different somehow, though Ben couldn’t put his finger on the change. Inside, on a much-folded piece of paper, Nemesis had written back: 

> _O my enemy—_
> 
> _Suffice it to say that control of the Weather is a rather useful skill for a person on a sports team, a skill I therefore decided to acquire. I had only ever made it rain once before (when I was four, and angry with my Mother) so this time I decided to use the Sympathetic Method by way of ducking a holy image in water, which seems to be the surest approach to conjuring rain (see Golden Bough pp. 75-77). For this purpose I used a pebble my Sister sent me, which she claims looks like the Virgin Mary and will thusly turn me from my Wicked Ways._
> 
> _In short, the spell worked, albeit only in a two-foot radius about my Person, thoroughly drenching my homework and most of my makeup spells (but not—you will notice—this Book, on which I placed a warding spell just for you), so I daresay it was a resounding success._
> 
> _Defenestratingly [Devastatingly?] Yours,  
>  _ _Nemesis_
> 
> _P.S. How do you like my new perfume?_

This, Ben realised, was the difference with the book. This time it did not smell of jasmine under the charged, staticky spice of leftover magic, but a new scent, something sweet and musky. It reminded him of strolling through a rose garden in the half-light of dawn; of plucking a long-stemmed flower and bringing it indoors into a dark study full of antique books, a log fire crackling on the hearth.

Ben held the book up to his face and let its pages fan open one by one. The fingerprint of magic it bore was, quite undeniably, the same as the one he had found on the windows into Ingary. It appeared that his adversary could not only control the weather, but blast holes into other worlds as well. 

Small wonder, then, that he acquired the mysterious ability to write legibly as soon as he was talking about his work.

Ben breathed deep of the morning-rose fragrance, and this time was less successful in suppressing the butterfly wings in his stomach. He was beginning to understand the magnitude of the trouble he was in.

 

 

He’d found the door early on, during his first year at Swansea. 

It hadn’t been hard. Everyone knew about it, after all, even if they didn’t believe it was real. It was one of those university legends, like the vampire of the Physical Sciences hallway, or the coffin buried beneath the football field, or the one dot-matrix printer in the Geology building that was known to suck up souls and print them out again as unrecognisable ink splotches. Students whispered the stories to each other in the dead of night, when band practice ran late or the campus buses kept them waiting, and forgot them again as soon as morning came. 

The door was different, though. Ben had done the research. He’d talked to people. He’d gone looking, and during a lonely winter break had finally found it half-submerged under a pile of old packing boxes in the storage room of the library. That same day he had set foot in Ingary for the first time, and hadn’t looked back since.

(“I don’t know what you are,” Prince Justin had said, when Ben fetched up at the palace in Kingsbury after a few weeks of confused wandering. “But I know you’re one of a kind.”) 

Ben knew he was the only one to find that door in a hundred years, let alone muster up the magic to get through it. There was a perverse streak of pride in him that wanted to keep it that way. But there was another part of him that felt the secret burn like a hundred pounds in his wallet—it was too big, too good, to be kept to himself. He had to share it, whatever Justin and Mrs. Pentstemmon thought; he must, he must, or he would go mad.

 

  

He did have one more clue about the book thief now. The sheet of paper on which the most recent note had been written transpired, upon closer inspection, to be an invoice for library fines made out to one Howell Jenkins.

He knew better than to think this an accidental oversight. The book thief must know that Ben was closing in on him, and was making overtures in the hopes of a formal introduction. All the same, Ben still made out his response to _Nemesis_ , which by now seemed an honorific of sorts, a salutation in itself:

> _Nemesis,_
> 
> _That does not sound to me like a success at all. And small wonder—if a holy image cannot even turn you from your wicked, book-thieving ways, I don’t see how it could summon a storm. Might I suggest using a more potent token of power? Since you are familiar with the laws of the Sympathetic Method, it would not be difficult to use, say, a recording of rain noises as the keystone of your spell; and draw on the transference of auditory properties to distill out real rain._
> 
> _Another observation: you owe enough in library fines to buy yourself an entire bookshelf of Golden Boughs._
> 
> _Foe_
> 
> _P.S. As far as I can tell, your perfume suits your character perfectly: a riotous and inexplicable oddity._

 

 

He returned the book on a Friday. It poured all weekend, and most of the Monday after.

 

 

This time, _The Golden Bough_ came back smelling of cardamom and cloves and water hyacinth: a heady scent that put Ben in mind of iced martinis and rocky beaches, and long summer nights in a pavilion under the stars. Folded inside was a sheet of ink-smeared paper that appeared to be crucial lecture notes for PH3242 Philosophy of Magic and Religion. On the reverse, Nemesis’s long-familiar scrawl was waiting to greet him.

> _Song of the nightingale! Viper in the grass!—_
> 
> _All praise! It did not even cross my mind to draw on auditory transference, but I tried it your way and it worked. Admittedly I could not find any rain noise tapes in the Library, but I did the next best thing and used some ocean sounds instead. You will, of course, have noticed my Success (indeed it was a greater Challenge to get the rain to stop), except that the ocean tape also included some faint echoes of whalesong, and now my dorm room is haunted by phantom whales._
> 
> _O my enemy, my brilliant adversary, in short I am much indicted [indebted?] to you. Are you much accusationed [accustomed?] to performing such spells? I would deeply like to know more about your Research._
> 
> _Also, you are right, and what I do not sponge [splurge?] on library fines I sponge [SPLURGE] on perfume, for Luxury is not a necessity but the Illusion of luxury is; so I fear I shall have to keep fighting you for this Book._
> 
> _Appallingly [Appealingly?] Yours,  
>  _ _Nemesis_
> 
> _P.S. “A riotous and inexplicable oddity” is the best assessment of my Character I have recently heard, or at least the one I like most; and believe me, I have heard many._

Ben slept on it that night, and the night after, and the night after that. He did so quite literally, with _The Golden Bough_ and its strange summery scent tucked under his pillow—only, he told himself, so that his sleeping brain could listen for the oscillations of Nemesis’s magic, and perhaps come to some sort of useful conclusion about him.

In the end, he wrote back:

> _Nemesis,_
> 
> _Might I propose a mutually beneficial solution? We could share the book and study together (my first final is coming up in exactly three weeks), and I could tell you about my research._
> 
> _Foe_

After some soul-searching, he added,

> _P.S. I would also like to see if you are a riotous oddity in person._

He sprayed some of his own apple-scented cologne on the note (it went well with the water hyacinth), tucked it between the pages of the book, and dropped it off at the library the next morning. If he gave himself time to think about it, he would lose his nerve.

Justin was going to kill him.

 

 

He waited, and waited, and waited.

“Yes, your holds are due to come in on the nineteenth of April,” the librarian’s assistant told him, looking harrassed. “Like I said, Mr. Sullivan, we’ll let you know when you can come in and pick them up, so if you could just be patient—” 

Ben took the hint, and backed off. He came back on the twentieth, made questioning eyebrow waggles at the librarian, received a helpless head-shake in reply, and went away again. He did the same on the twenty-first, the twenty-second, and the twenty-third.

By the twenty-fourth, he was boiling over.

It was finals week, and the number of energy drinks he’d had was far outstripping the number of hours he’d slept. He was quite sure he’d bombed his Latin final that morning. He desperately needed his library books to revise for his other exams—well, he didn’t need _The Golden Bough_ in particular, because he wasn’t a fool and he’d made comprehensive outlines of the most pertinent chapters at the very outset of the Battle for the Book, but Nemesis couldn’t have known that. He was a selfish, self-absorbed book hog who didn’t give a damn about anything besides spells and perfumes and, apparently, tearing the universe to smithereens for a pasttime.

By now Ben had gone something like thirty hours without sleep. It was past midnight, and he had a Shakespeare final at eight o’ clock the next day. The walls of his dorm room were starting to shimmer before his eyes, which were watering; his face was blotched with pink and grey from lack of sleep; and all he could think was that he was going to fail all his exams and have to repeat the semester and he couldn’t afford the extra tuition and his mother and three sisters and Mrs. Pentstemmon and quite possibly the King of Ingary were all going to be disappointed in him.

He needed _The Golden Bough_ back. It was the only way to save his grades and, therefore, his life. From that premise it was a simple if precarious leap of logic to the conclusion that he would have to find the book and carry it off by any means necessary, up to and including fighting Howell Jenkins in an epic rooftop duel to the death. 

He still had Nemesis’s notes tucked away in a folder with all his Ingary research. They had always seemed somehow related, and Ben prided himself on his intuitive filing system. You couldn’t touch something without leaving a part of yourself behind—life force, or skin cells, or aura, or DNA, or whatever you wanted to call it. It was the first thing Mrs. Pentstemmon had taught him. So it was easy enough to construct a finding spell around the rugby flyer, the library fine, and the philosophy notes, and to ascertain that Nemesis was at this moment in his dorm, which was not ten minutes on foot from Ben’s.

He took the obvious course of action. 

He downed another energy drink, got dressed, and started on the march across campus like a caffeine-fuelled avenging angel, cloaked in rage and driven by spite. He let his magic crackle around him like the air before a storm. Thunderclouds mustered overhead. Grass withered beneath his feet. He burst through the door into Nemesis’s dorm without ceremony, strode into the front lounge, and said, “Which one of you is Howell Jenkins?”

This late at night, there were still a few students sitting around in sad little islands of books and papers. They lifted bleary, red-rimmed eyes to him. Ben saw at once that none of them was Nemesis. For one thing, they all looked like honest, decent folk. “Oh,” said one of them, eyeing Ben across a can of Coke. “Here’s another one.”

Ben drew himself to his full and not inconsiderable height. Overhead, thunder rolled. “Another what?” 

“Did he jilt you or your sister?” someone else asked. “Or steal your girl?”

Ben had stopped listening. Something at the very periphery of his vision had caught his attention, something familiar and vitally important: the beloved _Golden Bough_ with its bright red cover, sitting on the side table like a witness for the prosecution waiting to be called to the stand. Ben leapt across a couch and two students and snatched it up. “There you are!”

A door creaked open. Through the dark window, a fork of lightning split the sky in three. A new voice said, “What in blazes is going on down there?”

Ben looked up. There, on the stair that led up to the dorm rooms, stood an apparition from the mouths of hell itself. It took the shape of a fresh-faced undergrad in a Welsh Rugby sweater and pyjama pants, looking peevish and set-upon. His hair, so deep a black it was almost blue, was bundled back in a messy knot at the base of his head. It came down around his face in curling tendrils, framing a set of high narrow cheekbones and pale green eyes. Those eyes took in Ben, and the book in his hand, and widened. “Oh, no.”

No one was even pretending to study now. All eyes were on them. Ben brandished _The Golden Bough_ at the apparition, feeling like the priestly murderer who would come bursting into Diana’s sacred grove of old to slay the King of the Wood and rule in his place. “Oh, yes.”

Howell stabbed a long finger at him. “Not you.” 

“Me,” said Ben.

“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this!” wailed Howell. He tore his hands through his hair. It came cascading out of its unruly bundle to dangle like a wet cat around his shoulders. “Not so soon! At least let me get changed first!”

He turned on his heel and charged back up the stairs. The noise broke through Ben’s daze. “Come _back_ ,” he yelled; and when this did not stop Howell’s sleek-lined silhouette from receding up the stairs, he burst into a run and shot after him.

A chorus of approving hoots and whistles erupted in his wake. Ben pursued Howell up three flights of stairs and down a narrow hallway, not stopping to look back. Howell was fast. He was an athlete, after all, and on top of that seemed to be the sort of person who got a lot of regular practice running away from things. From one of the rooms, a groggy voice groaned, “Go to sleep, Howell.”

“Sorry!” Howell yelled. He seized one of the doors and flung himself inside, and the lock turned with a click.

Ben pounded on the door with his fists. He was not sure what, exactly, he was going to do on the other side, but he had come too far to stop. By now he had summoned so much magical energy that he wasn’t sure he could let go of it without hurting himself. “Let me in!”

“I’m not decent!” yelled Howell, in a shrill panicky voice that suggested this was an epoch-ending calamity. A blast of magic detonated inside the room, sending Ben staggering back from the door. Then came a cacophony of loud fizzing noises. “Give me five minutes to fix my hair!” 

The fizzing intensified. A horrible scraping noise joined in the racket. Ben’s arms were goosebumped from the force of the enchantment. Howell might have been summoning demons, or raising the dead, but he was most certainly not fixing his hair. Ben had lurid visions of crushing singularities and ripping wormholes and suns falling out of skies. “What are you playing at? Let me in or I’ll break the door down!”

By way of answer, a foot-long icicle came shooting through the door like a sabre, making stabbing motions at Ben’s face. Ben dove aside just in time. There came a noise like a cliff sagging into the sea, and then a shout of, “Damnation!” 

Ben smashed the icicle apart with a flick of his hand and banged on the door again. Ordinarily he would just have blasted his way through, like he did with his own front door every time he locked himself out, but there were powerful spells guarding this one. “I’ll fill your room with spiders if you don’t open this door right now!”

“Go ahead,” said Howell’s haughty voice, somewhat out of breath. A tongue of flame licked through the crack beneath the door, forcing Ben to jump back again before the hem of his jeans caught fire. “I like spiders.”

“Of course you do,” panted Ben, vanishing the flames with some difficulty. “You’re an evil wizard who performs dark rites out of his dorm room. Of _course_ you like spiders.”

“Yes,” said Howell, “so very wicked, but at least I have better things to do in the middle of the night than fight a wizarding duel with an innocent stranger— _what are you doing_?”

Ben had switched tactics. The storm clouds were hanging in the sky right there, summoned by the combined force of his magic and Howell’s, and he needed neither a holy image nor an auditory charm to pull the rain out of them. He could hear it hissing down into Howell’s dorm room, first a light misting, then a drizzle, then a torrent. “My _hair_ ,” shrieked Howell, and then—belatedly—“my _exam notes_ ,” and then, “Oh, all right, all right, you can come in, you fiend.”

The spells on the door gave way. With nothing to counterbalance it, Ben’s own magic all but blew it off its hinges, and Ben himself staggered through after it. He flailed for his footing, and got his first look around the room.

It was not quite a supervillain lair. There were no skeletons, or taxidermied animals strung up around the walls on chains. It was a dorm room more or less like his own—a good deal messier, to be sure, with clothes and books and papers covering every flat surface and sliding down all the non-flat ones. There were, in fact, more clothes than floor to walk on. They spilled out of the open closet, oozed from under the bed, and swamped the chair and most of the study table. There was a small refuse heap of greasy dishes on the nightstand, and rainwater was trickling down the seams of the floorboards to puddle inch-deep in the centre of the room. Somewhere in the walls, a whale whistled.

And then there was the hole in the universe. 

Part of the plaster behind the bed had crumbled away, leaving a cavernous entrance large enough to step through. Daylight was coming through the hole, though outside the dorm it was still one o’ clock on a rainy night. On the other side Ben glimpsed a narrow gravel footpath ribboning down a grassy rise, and beyond that, the toy-like shapes of shops and houses clustered along a cobweb sprawl of roads, stretching on until the sky ran into the sea. Gulls shrieked overhead, and a faint breeze blew the tang of salt into the room.

By now Ben knew Porthaven by sight and sound and smell, dear as the back of his own hand. He swore. He swore some more, long, loud, and fulsome, and turned to make sure the door was shut.

“I was trying to hide it before you came in,” said Howell sulkily. His wet hair hung in limp snakes around his face, dripping like seaweed. “But you may as well see it while you’re here tormenting me. Go on, it’s quite safe.”

Ben stared at him. Of all the strange sights laid out before him, it was Howell himself who seemed most preposterous. Then he looked once more at the hole in the wall, thought, _why the hell not_ , and—against his better judgement—stepped through into the land of Ingary. 

It was real, all right. No mere window, not one of those mirages where one might get dreamlike glimpses of another world brushing past one’s own, far-off and unreachable as the backdrop of a painting. This was a different animal altogether. Ben could feel the wind ruffling his hair, hear the gravel crunch beneath his feet. Some way off, a grazing cow lifted her head to give him a suspicious look. Ben took a few more steps down the path, and found he could go no farther. 

There was nothing in the way that he could see. It was just like coming up against a glass wall, impenetrable, inexorable, no give at all in it. Ben pushed for a few seconds, feeling for its edges with his magic. Nothing. 

“It doesn’t work,” said Howell, in that same long-suffering voice. He came up next to Ben, his arms folded across his chest. In the past few seconds he had managed to cast some kind of drying spell on his hair, so that it now flowed in smooth silky waves over his collarbones, and Ben caught a faint whiff of honeysuckle from his clothes. He was still, alas, in pyjama pants. “It turns out that opening holes in the fabric of reality is harder than I anticipated.” 

Ben rubbed at his temples. The cow had abandoned her grazing and was now ambling over to them, only to butt her head up against the other side of the barrier and give a startled _mooo_. He needed to lie down for a long time. “Why?” 

Howell’s chin went up. Seen in one light he looked martyred and noble; in another, a sly-eyed faery king brooding in a circle of toadstools. “Well, you put about four hundred wards on the one door that worked. _And_ there were royal guards on the other side, and I didn’t want to cause an international incident, so I decided I just had to make my own way.”

It seemed futile to point out that he had already caused an inter-universal incident by trying to connect the two worlds where they shouldn’t have connected. _All that untrained power,_ Mrs. Pentstemmon had said the first time she’d laid eyes on Ben, clicking disapprovingly while she paced circles around him. _A danger to himself and everybody around him._ The same went for Howell Jenkins, except sevenfold. “I meant,” said Ben, kneading his forehead again, “why do you want to get across?” 

“Why?” Howell repeated. “ _Why_? Are you joking? A land where my sister can’t reach me, where I can maybe make a living doing what I love—” he let loose another blast of magic at his hair, which gave an obliging ripple—“instead of signing my soul away to my brother-in-law’s audit firm and joining his legions of dead-eyed junior executives?” He bared his teeth in a smile, blithe and bright as tinsel. “Why on earth not?”

Standing in the dead end of a no-man’s land, Ben thought how odd it was that he had found a kindred spirit here—not in the hallways of power at Kingsbury, or the flowery courtyards of the Pentstemmon estate, but in the thoroughly unmagical drudgery of his college life. He glanced down the ramshackle jumble of streets spread out beneath the rise, and over his shoulder at the sliver of dorm room visible through the hole in the wall, and then back at Howell. This apparition, this appalling, perfumed monstrosity, felt like the most solid thing in the two worlds between which they stood.

“Yes,” said Ben. “I concur.”

Howell gave him a sharp look. The keenness of his bright eyes was easy to miss amid the explosive diversions of—well, the rest of him, but Ben knew by now to look closely. “Anyway, that’s moot.” He waved a hand at the invisible barrier. “My magic isn’t strong enough to force a way through yet.” 

He’d come close, though. The cow gave a snort of annoyance, put her head down, and charged like a bull. Ben and Howell stepped back reflexively, and found themselves standing shoulder to shoulder against the dorm wall, the backs of their hands brushing.

“Well,” said Ben, above the furious mooing and scraping, “if you put up an awning and some walls, you could always use this place as a walk-in closet.”

Howell grinned. It was a bit like watching the sun come up over the sea from his bedroom in Mrs. Pentstemmon’s country house—first the faintest streaks of rose and gold, and then a sudden blaze of light, sparkling and scintillating on the green water. “I always knew I’d like you,” he said.

 

 

 

Ben remembered almost nothing of his Shakespeare final the next morning.

What he remembered was sitting in the sunlit grove of beeches outside the library with Howell after, studying with their heads bent close over their one copy of _The Golden Bough_. Or at least, Ben studied, while Howell yawned and stretched and magicked chains of daffodils into circlets, and made dismissive noises whenever Ben asked if he could turn the page. “Face it,” said Ben at last, when this had gone on for an hour. “You never needed this damnable book at all.”

Howell looked injured. “Of course I did,” he said. “It had the same brand of magic as the wards on the door into Ingary. I needed to study it. And you.”

“Me,” said Ben in disbelief. He shut the book with a bang. He hadn’t been able to concentrate anyway, not with Howell and his rose-morning perfume two inches from his face.

“Yes,” said Howell airily. He brought his knees to his chest and sat hugging them, looking up at Ben from under an artfully misplaced lock of hair. A crown of pale yellow flowers dangled from his fingers, still glistening with dew. “To see if you would take me across if I bribed you. Or seduced you. But then I reckoned you were too honourable for that, so I just started trying to dig a way through on my own.”

Ben felt an odd, misplaced twinge of guilt. “Look, it’s not that I wanted to keep the door to myself or anything,” he said. “It’s just—”

He cut himself off. In the end, none of it mattered. He’d known from the first moment he laid eyes on Howell that he was going to take him across to Ingary, sooner rather than later, and to hell with whatever Justin and Mrs. Pentstemmon thought. He kicked his notes aside and stretched out on the grass next to Howell, breathing in the smell of roses. Yesterday’s duel seemed to have worked well enough as a bloodletting, and he could think clearly again. “I’ll take you across on three conditions.”

Howell’s uncanny eyes took on that knifepoint shimmer again. A force for good, and better on their side than anyone else’s. “Yes?”

“First,” said Ben, “that you stop blowing holes in the universe. Aside from it being dangerous, I’m the poor shmuck who’s probably going to have to repair them.” 

Howell sighed. “Oh, well,” he said. “As long as I get to keep the walk-in closet.”

“Second,” said Ben, “that you come with me to see my magic teacher Mrs. Pentstemmon as soon as we’re through. You’re a menace left untaught.”

Unsurprisingly, the prospect of magic lessons cheered Howell up at once. “I can do that,” he said, with an imperious wave of his hand. “I suppose I’ll need you to be my tour guide, anyway.”

Ben imagined showing Howell round the sights of Kingsbury, taking him to the best taverns and bookstores in Market Chipping, walking with him on the beaches of Porthaven; and something seemed to come unstuck inside his chest. “Third,” he said, and hesitated just for a moment. “That you get coffee with me first?”

Howell laughed. In the late morning light, he glowed like a suncatcher: sharp-edged, many-faceted, impossible to look away from. He leaned over, his smile splitting his face, and perched the daffodil chain gently on Ben’s head. “Let’s go now.”

 

 

**Epilogue**

Many years later, Prince Justin would enter the palace library to find the two Royal Wizards dozing off at one of the worktables, their heads pillowed on the same book.

It was a baffling sight. There were, Justin was sure, at least six copies of the book in question ( _Poetry in Curses and Curses in Poetry: A Brief Overview_ ) somewhere in the stacks. His kingly brother kept the library well stocked, after all. But then again, he’d seen enough of wizards—and these wizards in particular—to know that most everything they did was baffling.

He stoked up the fire on the hearth and left them to it, slipping quietly out of the library.

**Author's Note:**

> this is dedicated to the unknown person or persons who keep borrowing that one anaïs nin book from my local library and then _not returning it for weeks_
> 
> [dirtybinary on tumblr](http://dirtybinary.tumblr.com) | [my second book](http://valeaida.tumblr.com/post/162432410621/everyone-has-a-secret-to-keep-alone-disgraced) is out now, check it out maybe


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